Roots of Impunity

3. Intimidation, Manipulation, and Retribution

A couple of years ago, Hamid Mir, Najam Sethi, Umar Cheema, and other prominent figures in the news media began going public with the threats they were receiving from intelligence agencies. It was a risky calculation, but the silence, they reasoned, encouraged intimidation and allowed impunity to persist.

Cheema, a journalist with The News who was exposing corruption in the army, had repeatedly been warned by officers of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate to stop writing. The last official notice came during a meeting with the head of the ISI’s Islamabad detachment, when a colonel told Cheema he was overdoing it with his articles about the thrashing of a civilian professor at the army-run National University of Modern Languages. The university’s registrar, the man who had beaten the professor, was an ex-brigadier, and Cheema was accusing the army of protecting its own.

The ISI meeting was cordial, but it was the last of its kind. In the next encounter, in September 2010, Cheema was pulled over at night by men dressed as police commandos. They told him he’d hit and killed a pedestrian. He knew they were lying but had to follow. He was taken to a safe house, stripped naked, beaten to a pulp, and filmed. “When they released me, they told me not to go public. They took pictures of me naked, forcing me to take poses, and said if I spoke up the pictures will be put on YouTube,” Cheema recalled. “After that, when I was headed home, I was thinking: What should I do?” Speak out, he wondered? “I told myself I’ll have to do it. Silence won’t help me.”

Cheema’s writing is more forceful than ever today, but the
fear hasn’t left and neither has the feeling that he is sometimes being
followed. The next time he was pursued, as he was traveling with family and
chased through the streets, he went public again. But soon he stopped. He
realized he would start to seem paranoid.

It’s a tricky dance that journalists must improvise. If they
are covering security, the wars, and the militants, they will inevitably have
contacts in the security establishment, which is where the trouble usually
begins. Journalists like Mir, Sethi, or Mohammad Malick will attack one piece
of the establishment too hard, the threat rises to a serious enough level that
they have to leave the country, the crisis passes, and they resume their
attacks.

After the May 2011 U.S. raid on Abbottabad, as the TV anchors
pounded the military for being incompetent, Hamid Mir, one of the most popular
personalities on Geo TV, got a call from a brigadier that the director general
of intelligence at the time, Shuja Pasha, wanted to see him. Here’s how the
conversation with Pasha proceeded, according to Mir:

“Mr. Mir, this system and Pakistan cannot
co-exist.”

“What system?” asked Mir.

“The parliamentary form of democracy and Pakistan.”

“Do you want a presidential form?” asked Mir.

“Yes.”

“This is not your job. It’s the job of Parliament to change
the constitution.”

Pasha then spoke abusively about the son of the Punjab chief
minister, the son of the president, the sons of other chief ministers. “Do you
want your children ruled by these sons?” he asked Mir.

“We had a very bad meeting,” Mir told me when we met in
Islamabad. “He is talking politics the whole time.” After that meeting,
parliamentary democracy and the sons of different politicians began taking a
critical beating from talk show hosts and columnists. And suddenly they were
all promoting Imran Khan, the popular cricketer-turned-populist-politician who
led the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, or PTI, in the May 2013 elections.Pasha had decided Khan was the man to back. “Politicians called me, ‘Mir, Mir, I want advice. Should I join Imran Khan? Pasha is putting
pressure on us.’”

When I asked the ISI whether Pasha had been pushing support for Imran Khan, a security official denied the reports. “Pasha was never pressuring
any politicians to join PTI,” he said. “There are allegations and people are
saying PTI was being patronized by Pasha, but there is no truth to it. I have
asked Pasha many times.”

But another TV anchor said he had a similar run-in with the
ISI. “Before Abbottabad they called me because we were criticizing the ISI’s
political role, which kept breaking with the political parties,” said the
anchor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Two officers met with him and put
him on the spot: “Why do you keep criticizing ISI? Why do you utter the name of
ISI?” The anchor said he pushed back: “So I said, ‘Why can’t we name the ISI in
that situation?’ I told them my two complaints were why do you harass
journalists and why do you interfere in the political process.” The senior
officer denied the ISI did either. And so the anchor asked why Pasha was
supporting Imran Khan if the agency had no political agenda. “They said I
shouldn’t criticize the ISI and I shouldn’t name the ISI. I didn’t agree with
their views, and at the end of the meeting the senior person told the junior
person: ‘He needs more sessions.’”

Such a comment might seem empty were it not for Pakistan’s
well-established record of pressure, intimidation, and retribution against
critical news media. Saleem Shahzad, an Asia Times Online reporter, was
summoned to ISI offices in October 2010 after writing an article about the
release of a Taliban leader. During the meeting, the director general of the
ISI media wing, Rear Adm. Adnan Nazir, told him that the story had embarrassed
the country and urged him to retract the article and divulge his sources,
Shahzad told colleagues. When he refused, Shahzad said, Nazir made a parting
comment: “Saleem, I must give you a favor. We have recently arrested a terrorist
and have recovered lot of data, diaries and other material during the
interrogation. He has a hit list with him. If I find your name in the list I
will let you know.”

Shahzad said he interpreted the comment as a threat against
his life. We know all this because Shahzad was unnerved enough to write up
notes of the meeting and put them in an email to his editor, Tony Allison, and
others. He asked his editor to “keep this email as record if something happens
to me in the future.” He also sent a version of the email to Nazir, which he
labeled “for the record” in the subject line.

Seven months and many critical stories later, Saleem Shahzad
was dead. During the official investigation into Shahzad’s murder, a number of
other journalists reported being pressured by intelligence officials during
encounters similar to the meeting described by Shahzad. “The ISI must deflate
its larger-than-life image, focus on its mandated job, and evolve a transparent
policy in its relationship with the media,” Imtiaz Alam, secretary-general of
the South Asian Free Media Association, said in testimony before the official
commission of inquiry. Halting the practice of harassing journalists, he said,
was one place to start.

In testimony before the commission of inquiry, Nazir denied
making the comments attributed to him in Shahzad’s emails. Nazir acknowledged
getting Shahzad’s “for the record” email but said it was not “expedient” for
him to respond. Brig. Zahid Mehmood Khanare, who testified on behalf of the
ISI, denied that the agency engaged in the harassment of journalists.

In a way, the army and ISI are in shock. Ever since Pervez
Musharraf allowed the licensing of private broadcasters in 2002, there’s been
an explosion of media outlets. The press has never been so free or so critical.
Nor have members of the security establishment ever had to answer for their
policies, mistakes, and crimes in a public forum the way they do now. After the
bin Laden raid, the media demanded answers from the army: How could the United
States have carried out the operation undetected? Was the army, with its
bloated budget, incompetent or in cahoots with the United States? Which was it?

Their honor insulted, intelligence and military officials
began thrashing back at the media, using the methods they have always relied
on: intimidation or “ownership,” that is, buying the loyalty of journalists or
encouraging loyalty through access. “There is a longstanding tradition of ISI
penetration of the media that goes back 30 years and started in a big way during
Gen. Zia ul-Haq’s regime,” said author and journalist Ahmed Rashid, a CPJ board
member. “Allowing a free electronic media during Musharraf’s time certainly
presented a challenge for the intelligence agencies because of the large number
of TV stations that were started. But they have been successful in penetrating
all the TV networks in one way or the other.”

So amid the Abbottabad outcry, the agency fed trusted news
anchors a harshly anti-American line. One political analyst said the Pakistani
Army chief, Ashfaq Kayani, allowed the ISI to push the stance with loyal news
media. For Kayani, it was a matter of upholding the military’s honor, said the
analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He’s basically a person who
believes in honor above all. He’s crazy about honor. He comes from a community
where honor is worth killing for.” The ISI chief was similarly motivated.
“Pasha told a friend of mine, ‘We went ballistic when they killed Osama. We
lost our minds we were so angry.’”

Just about every newspaper and TV station has someone who is
either sympathetic to the ISI and army point of view, or willing to be
sympathetic for a price. Many Pakistanis can even name them. The ISI’s media
wing calls up preferred anchors, talking heads, and newspaper editors and tells
them what line to push. When the Kerry-Lugar Act of 2009 was adopted, for
example, the security establishment was furious because it meant U.S. funds
could be directed to civilian authorities without going through the military.
Although most of the Pakistani public had little idea what the law said,
anchors and talking heads were brought into the military’s media wing and told
why it was against the national interest. Almost immediately the airwaves were
filled with TV programs bashing the Kerry-Lugar Act.

Other methods are used to secure media loyalty: Many
Pakistani cities, for example, have what are called “media colonies,” where the
government sets aside land for journalists at subsidized rates. A free, even
courageous press is not mutually exclusive of a manipulated press anywhere in
the world—and certainly not in Pakistan. As an American official in Pakistan
put it: “It’s a manipulated media, but remarkably free. Right now in the Urdu
newspapers they plant scare stories about the U.S. building a cantonment in
Islamabad with 300 Marines secreted away in the U.S. Embassy!” Not just that,
but the Urdu press and even Mir on his TV show have accused Americans working
in Pakistan of being spies, even giving out their addresses.

The major networks employ a calculated balancing act. So,
for instance, Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman, chief executive of the Jang Group, will
allow the army to sway his anchors on Geo TV, but follow the America-bashing
with a half-hour slot of Voice of America. “It’s a game you play constantly
with how much influence and how much you can get versus where to concede,” said
Faisal Bari, senior adviser on Pakistan with the Central Eurasia Project of the
Open Society Foundation.

Increasingly on the important talk shows, liberal voices are
being eased out, replaced by retired generals and other right-wing pundits.
Geo has been careful to balance out the programs of Sethi and Mir—both of whom
regularly criticize and expose the security establishment’s wrongdoing—with
programs supporting the military’s heroic efforts or simply airing patriotic
songs. Geo has learned its financial lessons over the years. Under Musharraf,
the network was simply shut down for a few months. Under President Asif Ali
Zardari, in 2011, the government twice tried to revoke Geo’s sports channel
license, a step that could have cost the station millions had it not been
blocked by the Supreme Court. Though the government officially cited the lack
of a “security clearance” for the revocations, everyone understood that Zardari’s
government was trying to take revenge for Geo’s constant attacks on the
president. For the most part, media and government thrust and parry, finding a
way to live with each other. Until someone goes too far.

Sethi, editor-in-chief of The Friday Times and host of his own show on Geo, has managed through connections, humor, high visibility, and sheer gumption to evade physical punishment numerous times. At times, Geo took to cutting off the audio when he touched on “problematic” issues such as criticizing the judiciary. And then there were the threats to his life since 2007, first from the Taliban for calling them terrorists instead of “militants” as other journalists do, and then from the ISI. Intelligence officers have either raged at him or passed on messages from their higher-ups that his programs went too far in their criticisms of the army and the ISI after the revelation that bin Laden was hiding out in Abbottabad, not far from the Pakistani capital.

On May 2, 2011, Sethi did a program about the raid in which
he said the army generals were either complicit or incompetent. This led to a
stormy meeting with then-ISI chief Pasha in which each accused the other of
misplaced patriotism. The Mehran naval base was attacked soon after, and
journalist Shahzad was kidnapped in Islamabad. A few days later, his tortured
corpse was fished out of a canal. Sethi went on air and alleged that the ISI
was behind the kidnapping and killing. “Saleem had confided to me and others
like the representative of Human Rights Watch in Pakistan, Ali Dayan Hasan, and
the head of the All Pakistan Newspapers Society, Hameed Haroon, before his
kidnapping that he was in serious trouble with the ISI and feared he might be
dealt with harshly,” Sethi told me from his home in Lahore.

After Shahzad’s murder, Sethi also devoted several of his
nighttime talk shows to Al-Qaeda’s infiltration of the military, and officials’
turning a blind eye to it—a subject Shahzad first exposed in his columns for
Asia Times Online. A senior minister whom Sethi would not identify informally
advised the journalist to back off if he cared for his safety.

The ISI was furious with Sethi, although he was not alone in
accusing the agency of killing Shahzad. The difference in Sethi’s case is that
he is relentless and provocative and his late-night program is one of the most
popular. He has also had extensive experience being “disappeared.” Sethi was
imprisoned at length during the 1970s in connection with the Baluch uprising.
In 1999, after an interview with the BBC about corruption in the Pakistani
government, Sethi was dragged from his home and detained on accusations of
treason.

“I was their prisoner for seven months and I know how these
things happen. I was in solitary like a football from one interrogation to
another—MI, ISI, Special Branch—and I know where people are taken and what
happens and I also know who is killed and who isn’t.” So despite their warnings
to back off, Sethi stood by his accusations of ISI involvement in Shahzad’s
murder and went even further. “They only meant to rough him up and teach him a
lesson,” he said. “The ISI can be mean but they don’t kill people in custody
just like that. I reconstructed the scene of what probably happened. I said
that Saleem probably died of asphyxiation owing to injuries on his ribs. I said
what normally happens is that people are picked up and gagged and blindfolded,
and put in a sack or gunny bag. They first try to destroy your confidence by
creating fear. When the victim arrives at the secret destination, he is dumped
on the floor. Then the kicking and shouting starts. The kicks are random, but
one ends up in a fetus position. You get kicked in the head and the ribs. It’s
the ribs in the upper part of the body. I said when the autopsy is done we
should look out for evidence of such torture. Four days later the autopsy said
the sixth rib and 10th or 12th rib were cracked and had punctured the lungs.
These guys who do all this are not experts in torture.”

The army and intelligence services were, not surprisingly,
upset with Sethi’s exposition. “Every journalist in town who had links with
these guys said they are hopping mad at you,” Sethi said. And yet he still
demanded a commission of inquiry in Shahzad’s death. The government said no. So
he went on TV. “I said, ‘I’m calling on the media to boycott the government and
the army’s news. We demand a commission of inquiry and if there is none we
won’t publish the news or press statements’” of the Inter Services Public
Relations, Sethi said. A few days later, the government announced a commission
of inquiry headed by a judge and including a journalist representative of the
Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists. Sethi then criticized the inclusion of
pro-military bureaucrats in the commission of inquiry, which further incensed
the military.

The commission was meant not only to inquire into the
background and circumstances of Shahzad’s abduction and murder but also to
identify the culprits. Instead, after laying out the testimonies of several
journalists, Human Rights Watch, police, and the ISI, the report in effect said
that any number of the actors in the war on terror could have killed Shahzad.

“Almost every journalist of repute in the country has
rubbished the report of this commission, which exonerates the ISI and leaves
all key questions unanswered,” Sethi said. In particular, the commission
concluded that “the culprits cannot be identified.”

The Home Ministry eventually issued an advisory to police
and intelligence agencies regarding threats against Sethi and his family, which
prompted the government to provide police guards. Nevertheless, Sethi learned
through what he described as high-placed sources that he was on a death list
and needed to leave the country. Sethi and his wife, Jugnu Mohsin, spent three
months in 2011 as senior fellows at the New America Foundation in Washington.
While Sethi was away, a credible source back home called and warned him to stay
away for some more time. He was told of a plot by a jihadi organization close
to the military to kill him, along with two other critical journalists, Khaled
Ahmed and Imtiaz Alam, both of whom work for the South Asia Free Media
Association, which is in the bad books of the military for advocating détente
and peace with India. But Sethi decided to risk a return. He cut short his trip
to the United States, returned to Pakistan, and in his first TV show from his
hometown said that he was “threatened by state and non-state actors” and that
“if anything happened to him or his family the top leadership of the military
would be held responsible.”

For months, he ventured out of his home only selectively and politely declined invitations to attend or speak at local conferences. The house is protected by armed guards, an alarm system, and surveillance cameras. The Sethis have invested in an armored vehicle. Geo built a studio in his home from which he broadcast a thrice-weekly show on current affairs. But the threats continued, as did Sethi’s provocative shows. In spring 2012, Sethi did a series of stories that dissected the ills of the army and ISI, exposing how spies, beginning under Musharraf and now Kayani, have slowly taken over an
army that used to be well-organized and strait-laced. A highly placed minister
whom Sethi would not name warned him that the government was picking up chatter
that the security establishment was annoyed. In a telling comment, the minister
told Sethi that the government didn’t want to lose him and that, “you know
power lies somewhere else.” It’s true, but it’s very unsettling to hear from a
high-level government official.

Attacks have come from other corners as well. “Journalists
close to the ISI are constantly accusing me in print and on the Internet of
being in the pay of America,” he said, an accusation that amounts to an
incitement to violence for the Jihadi networks. “This is a repeat of what
happened to me in 1999 when I ran a campaign exposing corruption in the Nawaz
Sharif government at the highest level. The pro-government media accused me of
being an ‘Indian agent’ and I was imprisoned for alleged treason. After I was
freed by the Supreme Court, the government’s dirty tricks department slapped me
with dozens of trumped-up income tax evasion cases in order to harass me. The
Musharraf government withdrew all the cases and the income tax officers who had
done the Sharif government’s bidding came and apologized to me later. So did
the then-prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, who said he was put up to it by a
‘misguided’ henchman. I am going through the same sort of harassment today at
the behest of the ISI, and the income tax department is coming under pressure
to harass me.”

Hamid Mir is one of the most popular faces on television, and
part of his appeal is precisely what makes many wary of him. He’s a talented
showman and has cultivated sources in every arena. Back in the days when he
secured an interview with Osama bin Laden, he was accused of being too close to
the ISI—how else could he have pulled off such a coup? These days he is
considered sympathetic to the militants and close to Zardari. Whatever his
political leanings, he relishes a good fight on the air.

At the end of 2007, in the midst of the lawyers’ movement
against Musharraf, Mir was banned from Geo TV for four months by the general
himself. The movement began in March of that year after Musharraf sacked Chief
Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and lawyers took to the streets demanding
his reinstatement and the upholding of the constitution. The media (including
Mir) played a significant part in supporting the movement. Mir took his show to
the road, organizing street programs, gathering huge crowds. In 2009, he
infuriated the army by reporting from within the Taliban—which had allegedly
kidnapped him and then let him tell their side of the story. Then his colleague
Musa Khankhel was killed. “It became clear if you’re killed, nothing will
happen,” he said of both the Khankhel and Shahzad cases.

In 2011, he decided to take up the issue of Baluchistan.
With the intensifying insurgency, the families of missing Baluch formed camps
in the park across from Parliament in Islamabad and outside the press club in Karachi,
anywhere they could get a hearing. The war in Baluchistan is widely ignored by
the major media outlets in Pakistan. As BBC journalist and novelist Mohammed
Hanif put it: “It’s hard to report. The agencies don’t want them to report it.
The networks don’t want to offend the Punjab office”—meaning the authorities in
Islamabad—“and there’s no advertising coming from Baluchistan so they don’t
care. But probably the biggest factor is fear.” As soon as the BBC goes to
Baluchistan, he added, “Intelligence follows them, stops them, and drives them
back. Even reporting the basic facts that someone was kidnapped or killed is
increasingly risky.”

Still, Mir did a show on Baluchistan. “Young people want an
independent homeland,” Mir told me when we met in Islamabad, shortly after he
had returned to the country after a brief departure for security reasons. “But
elders are saying, ‘We can’t survive without Pakistan. We’ll be slaves to Iran
or Afghanistan if we secede. It’s better to fight for our rights.’” One Baluch
leader said the Pakistani Army was really a Punjabi army. So Mir presented the
statement to two Punjabi parliamentarians live on his show. “They said, ‘Yes
he’s right.’ I got a text message after the show. ‘We will beat you on the
road. An army officer will teach you a lesson. You’ll be naked.’” This is
almost exactly what happened to Umar Cheema in 2010, so Mir forwarded him the
message. The next day Cheema published the whole affair in The News. The
episode quickly became a cause célèbre in Parliament, with Chaudhry Nisar Ali
Khan, the National Assembly opposition leader, claiming he was getting the same
threats.

Another commission was formed. The presidential engine
revved up. Rehman Malik, then interior minister, called Mir and told him to forward
the number and message. The inspector general of police called. Zardari called.
Malik called again and tried to persuade him to take two dozen police for
security, an offer Mir said was intended to frighten him. “I am not an Indian
agent and if I am that kind of high-value target why don’t they inform me in
writing?”

In the end, Mir took one police guard at home and one at the
office.

Then, in January 2012, Interior Ministry sources told him
that the phone numbers from which the threatening messages were sent belonged
to serving members of the ISI. Despite such evidence, the public accusations
against Mir got even more absurd. The agency claimed he was a CIA agent and had
actually hacked his own phone to make it seem as if he had received messages
from the ISI.

Mir eventually dropped the issue and moved on to other
reporting. He did a show about the family of missing persons who had set up
camp in front of Parliament. An elderly woman had filed a petition to the
Supreme Court to get back her three sons, dead or alive. They had been abducted
from jail by men who were alleged in court to have been with the ISI. One son
was dead. By the time the other two were produced in court, their mother had
died. Mir showed the covered faces of the accused abductors as they appeared in
court, and he lambasted them on television.

After the show Zardari called Mir. Here is how Mir recalled
the conversation:

“You are playing with fire. I don’t want to lose you. It
will be another bad patch on the name of my government if you are killed.”

“What shall I do?” Mir asked him.

“Be careful,” said Zardari.

“Who wants to kill me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sir, I suppose you are the supreme commander of the armed
forces of Pakistan.”

“Try to understand!” Zardari shouted.

The president’s office did not respond to CPJ’s request for
comment on Mir’s depiction of the conversation.

Mir persisted with his shows. The next one was an exclusive
interview with Younis Habib, a banker who was on his death bed and decided to
expose how in the 1990s the ISI plundered taxpayers’ money with the connivance
of the Pakistani army to manipulate politics. The story was an important turn
in the Mehrangate scandal, which brought a former army chief of staff and ISI
director general to court for the first time in Pakistani history, with both
sides accusing the other of misconduct.

Shortly after the show, Mir was advised to leave the
country, and he finally did for a week. But as Mir told me, if he is having
these kinds of highly dramatic, publicized troubles, just imagine what’s going
on in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Waziristan, and Baluchistan
beyond the eyes of the public.